Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)

What would it look like to approach the Bubble Nebula?
Blown by the
wind
and radiation from a massive star,
this bubble now spans seven
light-years
in diameter.
The hot star inside is thousands of times more luminous than our Sun,
and is now offset from the nebula's center.

You wake up in the
Kalahari Desert in
Botswana,
Africa.
You go outside your tent, set up your camera, and take
long exposures of the land and sky.
What might you see?
Besides a lot of blowing dust and the occasional
acacia tree,
you might catch many sky wonders.

Jupiter is stranger than we knew.
NASA's Juno spacecraft
has now completed its sixth swoop past
Jupiter
as it moves around its highly
elliptical orbit.
Pictured,
Jupiter is seen
from below where, surprisingly, the horizontal
bands that cover most of the planet disappear into
swirls and complex patterns.

What's happened in Hebes Chasma on Mars?
Hebes Chasma is a depression just north of the enormous
Valles Marineris canyon.
Since the depression is unconnected to other surface features, it is
unclear where the internal material went.

Sweeping through this stunning field of view,
Comet 71P/Clark
really is in the foreground of these cosmic clouds.
The 2 panel telescopic mosaic is color enhanced and is about 5 degrees
(10 full moons) across.

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744
is nearly 175,000 light-years
across, larger than
our own Milky Way.
It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern
constellation Pavo appearing as a faint, extended object in
small telescopes.
We see the disk of the nearby island universe tilted towards our
line of sight.

Is our Galaxy this thin?
We believe so.
Magnificent spiral galaxy
NGC 4565
is viewed edge-on from planet Earth.
Also known as the Needle Galaxy
for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop
on many telescopic tours of the northern sky,
in the faint but well-groomed
constellation Coma
Berenices.

What would it look like to approach Jupiter?
To help answer this, a team of 91 amateur
astrophotographers took over 1,000 pictures
of Jupiter from the Earth with the resulting images aligned and digitally merged
into the featured time-lapse video.
Image taking began in 2014 December and lasted just over three months.

What's causing the unusual ray of white light extending upward from the central horizon?
Dust orbiting the Sun.
At certain times of the year, a band of sun-reflecting dust from the inner
Solar System rises prominently before sunrise and is called
zodiacal light.